Part II Education as a Technological Phenomenon

In the previous section, building mainly upon the work of complexity theorists such as Brian Arthur, Stuart Kauffman, and John Holland, I developed a theory of how technologies work, using a model of technique that describes the different ways in which we participate in technologies as softer or harder. My purpose was to lay the groundwork for understanding the nature of education as a technological phenomenon, to which we now turn.

In this section, I build upon this groundwork to develop a theory of teaching, which I describe as a co-participation model. In this model, teaching is seen as a massively distributed technology in which we are all teachers of ourselves and others, in which our technologies are not just means but also parts of ends, machines that form part of our cognition, within our individual minds, beyond our minds and bodies, and tangibly intertwingled with the minds of others.

Chapter 6 is about the technologies that we label pedagogies and how they fit into broader technological assemblies. I use the word teaching in its title rather than learning because teaching (in some of its most significant aspects) is technological, whereas learning is not, and almost all acts of intentional learning (and many that are unintentional) are also acts of teaching, whether of self or of others. Thus, though framed as a theory of teaching, it is at least as much about how we learn as it is about how we teach. This learning is a massively distributed process in which what we learn is as much embedded in as it is enabled by our technologies, in which our technologies become part us as much as we become part them, so we are part of a collective, cultural, and species-level intelligence, and that collective intelligence is an inherent, indissociable part of each individual intelligence.

Above all, it is a vastly complex, dynamic, ever unfolding, always situated, and deeply human intertwingularity (Nelson, 1974) that makes us who we are as much as our hearts and limbs. The theory explains the nature and value of soft and hard pedagogies, how they develop, how they bridge gaps between us, and when and where they are used. This is not a description of psychological mechanisms, still less of changes in the brain. It is a different level of description altogether. When I describe the creation of machines in our minds, I make no assumptions or assertions about how they are instantiated.

Chapter 7 examines a range of popular families of educational theory—–described here as objectivist, subjectivist, and complexivist—in the light of the co-participation model, showing how they are more closely related than their proponents might care to admit.

Chapter 8 delves into what it means to be a co-participant in the technology of education, examining the nature of technique, on the one hand, as the development of hard skills to use or enact a technology and, on the other, as the soft, idiosyncratic, ever-situated expression of our individual hearts and minds. Hard and soft techniques are inseparable twins: hard techniques provide technologies that connect and extend our collective minds, making us capable of greater physical and cognitive activities; soft techniques provide the engines of passion, creativity, adaptation, and inspiration. The chapter goes on to use a lens of literacy (defined as the hard skills needed to participate in a given community) to gain a richer picture of the connection between technology and culture.